Top 25 Wikipedia Health Topics

One of the things it highlighted is the incredible use of Wikipedia for healthcare information. People are typically going to Google and looking for a disease. Based on Wikipedia’s page rankings, this often leads them there.

Now, what makes this more interesting is the article in the BBC News which says that 90% of wikipedia articles on health contain errors.

Of course, the trick in reading the article closely is that it says they found that “90% of the entries made statements that contradicted latest medical research”. What’s the difference? Well, we know that it takes years for evidence-based medicine to become adopted within healthcare. So, how long does it take the latest medical research to get updated on all the sites? What I would love to see is a comparison of Wikipedia to WebMD, Ebix, and Healthwise. That would be telling.